Sunday, February 20, 2011

'Where is the Media? Where is the Rest of the World?'

About 200 people demonstrated in front of the White House on Saturday challenging President Obama to help end recent violence in Libya.

The group was responding to reports of bloody clashes between protesters and soldiers in the isolated North African nation.

Malik Sahad, who helped organize the event outside the White House, said Libyans are now smuggling stories to the outside world via social media, essentially creating their own news coverage in hopes that the international community will step in.

"We have people that are risking their lives, who are finding ways to send their messages, their videos, their recaps, their recounts of what's been going on," Sahad said. "They're asking us, 'Where is the media? Where is the rest of the world? We don't have cameramen down here. We don't have Anderson Cooper down here. We don't have people on the ground level to give us support and to show the rest of the world what we've been going though.'"

That's because the Libyans are far more brutal and oppressive that the Mubarak regime, apparently. That and the Libyans are apparently jamming Al-Jazeera's signal.

Libyan forces fired machine-guns at mourners marching in a funeral for anti-government protesters in the eastern city of Benghazi Sunday, a day after commandos and foreign mercenaries loyal to longtime leader Moammar Gadhafi pummeled demonstrators with assault rifles and other heavy weaponry.

A doctor at one Benghazi hospital said 15 people died in Sunday's clashes. Earlier he said his morgue had received at least 200 dead from six days of unrest. The doctor said his hospital, one of two in Libya's second-largest city, is out of supplies and cannot treat more than 70 wounded in similar attacks on mourners Saturday and other clashes.

The crackdown in oil-rich Libya is shaping up to be the most brutal repression of anti-government protests that began with uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. The protests spread quickly around the region to Bahrain in the Gulf, impoverished Yemen in the Arabian Peninsula, the North African neighbors of Tunisia - Libya, Algeria, Morocco - and outside the Middle East to places including the East African nation of Djibouti and even China.

Yet here in America, some simpletons want to compare what's going on worldwide with the Obama-inspired idiocy in Madison.

Obama, meanwhile, is absent this weekend (probably hunkering down for the NBA All-Star game), so his stooge showed up with the odious Christiane Amanpour.

ABC''s Christiane Amanpour told Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton today that her picture in a new issue of Harper's Bazaar presents the perfect image for a high-profile diplomat -- standing in a corner.

Clinton chuckled at the idea -- "I just do what photographers tell me to do, it has no metaphorical meaning for me" -- but did allow that the cycle of protests and government reaction in the Middle East is testing the "balancing act" that is essential to foreign policy.

"We want to advance our security, our values, and our interests," Clinton said on ABC''s This Week. "And if there were one template that could be imposed on every situation, I wouldn't need to have this job, and nobody else would have to, either."

In approaching the unrest in Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, and perhaps other nations in the Middle East, the U.S. is pursuing its desire to promote democracies around the world, while guarding against anti-American extremists who might take advantage of the situation -- as happened in Iran in 1979.

Instead, she and her boss are now backed into a corner, so to speak.

"In general, Americans are in favor of human rights, freedom, democracy," Clinton said on ABC's This Week.

Yeah, except for the rights, freedom and democracy of conservatives. Or Libyans.